


Paragons

by darktruth



Category: Marvel (Comics)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 03:32:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19076626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darktruth/pseuds/darktruth
Summary: The X-Men are gone, and the world is rushing to fill the void left behind. Some look to do good, some bad, but others are simply left to fall between the cracks. A few lost souls may find themselves a new family, and discover their place within the Marvel Universe along the way.





	Paragons

**Author's Note:**

> Note- This is a story set within the Marvel U, but following on from old fan-fictions I used to write on Marvel.com and elsewhere. Many of the characters or events that I created in those fan-fictions with show up or be referenced here. I'm hoping I introduce them well enough here (this kind of works as a test for me in introducing things that are very familiar to me to new people), but if not and you feel confused by names or events I apologize, and will try to rectify as I go.

_Stark Unlimited HQ_   
_Greenwich Village, Manhattan_   
_Two Days Ago_

 

Tony Stark, dressed in a fine and very stylish, or at least so he thought, dark suit with red details around the cuffs and collar, smiled widely as he passed his numerous employees as they hurried about to work on whatever project had popped out of his mind. An entire building filled with people with the simple purpose of making the world a better place; by the ideas his futurist mind produced, of course.  
He brushed a hand through his sleek black hair as he made his way into his office, and turned to ensure the door was shut behind him. His head bowed as the smile faded from his face.  
“You shouldn’t be here.”

He turned slowly and his eyes fell over the man seated at his desk, dishevelled and seemingly in dire need of a thorough scrubbing. The black trenchcoat barely hung to his shoulders, shredded and singed in places, while the cowboy hat atop his head of long and matted brown hair seemed to lack a large chunk of the brim.  
“And where exactly should I be?” the masked asked darkly as his grey eyes examined the superhero billionaire stood before him.  
Stark exhaled sharply as he gestured towards the door behind him with a hand. “There are people here. Good people.”  
“Afraid I’ll hurt them?”  
Stark paused for a moment, as his mind worked to find the best, least offensive, phrasing. “I’m afraid the people who would hurt you will hurt them.”  
“Yes, better only mutants get hurt, isn’t it?”

Tony took a couple of breaths, then made his way towards a cabinet against the wall and retrieved a couple of glasses. “Drink? Nothing alcoholic, of course. I’m sure you understand. But we do have a fine selection of organic juices, or perfectly chilled water.”  
“I want you to help me find her!”  
Tony stared at the glasses in his hand. “Darktruth… The X-Men are gone.”  
“But we don’t know she is. We don’t know she was there.”  
“If she wasn’t, then...” he took a breath. “Then hopefully she was lucky enough to get underground, because if not it might have been better she had been with them. You know what it’s like out there.”  
“I know,” Darktruth replied in a growl of a voice. “I know that children are being executed while you sit in your binary tower and think up some fantastic future. But it’s not a future for mutants is it? Just humans. It’s always just for humans.”  
Stark cocked his head. “It’s ‘ivory tower’, and that isn’t fair.”

Darktruth rose from his seat so fast the hat fell from his head and landed softly upon the floor. “Isn’t it?! You know what’s happening and look where you are! Are you telling me, honestly, that if it was human families in their suburban homes facing down bullets in the night that you wouldn’t be out there, doing whatever you could to bring those monsters to justice? Because my people are dying out there, right now, and the best you can offer me is a drink.”  
Tony placed the glasses down and turned to him. “Look, the situation is complicated, if we...”  
“Not to me,” Darktruth cut him off as he moved around the desk and crossed the room to stare Tony Stark in the eye. “It isn’t complicated to me. People are dying. I remember when heroes did something about that kind of thing.” He headed for the door only to pause and glance back over his shoulder. “She admired you guys, y’know? The Avengers. She thought there was nobody better.” He gave a weak smile. “She sure was right, wasn’t she?”

Stark watched the man leave his office, and gestured to the red-headed Bethany Cabe to stand down, the woman quite obviously startled by the man that emerged from her boss’ office without clearance. He turned from the door and hesitated a moment before he retrieved a decanter of water from a fridge.  
“Miss Cabe!” he called out as he poured the water into a glass, he could hear her step into the office. “I have a favour to ask of you.”  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------

 

_Silver Lining Cafe_   
_Brooklyn_   
_One Day Ago_

 

Darktruth cracked his jaw as his eyes moved about the patrons that sipped at coffee from mugs of various sizes, and he did his best to not retch at the stench. He attempted to drive out the choking smell of coffee in the air around him as he took a long sip of his hot chocolate, and tried to be careful not to drip any onto his grey thrift shop suit.  
It seemed a strange place for fascists to meet, yet that was the word on the street. A mutant hate group AMT (Against Mutants Today, which he found particularly lazy) had made this place their unofficial headquarters, although Darktruth noted that as much as it was supposedly ‘unofficial’ the owner also did nothing to dissuade them from it. Perhaps they too hated mutants, or perhaps money simply trumps decency.  
He’d already spied two of their members, seated at a table in a suitably dark corner. One, a young man, sipped from a cup Darktruth would have thought only fitting for children, while the other, middle-aged, simply sat and waited. Dark eyes that surveyed the cafe about him.  
The younger man looked like just another of many Darktruth had seen in the weeks since the X-Men had up and vanished, dressed in a tight singlet and faux-military pants with a head that had clearly been shaven bald by his own hand. The kind of person who thought himself tougher than he was, but that only made him more dangerous.  
The other was entirely different. His posture completely straight, and his clothes, a buttoned white shirt and black trousers, so perfectly neat they could have just been ironed moments before. His hair was short, but perfectly clipped. Darktruth was wrong about a lot of things, but he was fairly confident that this particular man had military training. Perhaps armed forces, or maybe even HYDRA or SHIELD. This man complicated things.

He’d had a plan when he’d made his way to the cafe, one so simply he thought it flawless. He would wait for the AMT to meet, and then promptly teach them all a lesson for being worthless hate-filled slugs. Perhaps there’d be some bullets, but they’d all be his. He didn’t at all expect anyone who might actually know how to fight back, and now that he saw one he was given pause.  
He’d searched for her desperately, only to find no trace of her everywhere he went. Every lead went cold almost as quickly as he found it, and with each one he found himself ever colder than he’d been before. The answers were the same everywhere he went, if she wasn’t with the X-Men then she was likely dead anyway. Unless she’d been smart enough to run far away. He had thought about that, that perhaps he should take is search to Wales, but he knew her well enough to know that wasn’t her style. If mutants were in trouble here than it was here that she would remain, and if he couldn’t find her here…  
Coldness had quickly turned to anger within him, a burning rage. He needed to let it out, unleash it before it consumed him from within. The AMT were just lucky enough to be the first he found, he’d never intended for them to be the last.

He sucked in a long breath through his nostrils as his eyes glanced towards the doors and then back to the two in the corner. If anymore were coming they were taking their time, and the longer they took the more he was certain the older man would make him. He was better off with the element of surprise. Two bodies were still a message.  
His hand slid inside his jacket as his eyes remained locked upon them. His fingers danced across cold metal. They grasped and he prepared to stand when a shape moved to obscure his sight of them. His eyes rose to meet a stern-faced woman with red hair tied back into a ponytail.

He opened his mouth to ask her who she was when she pulled an envelope from her pocket and dropped it upon the table before him. “Before you get yourself killed look into that. Mr Stark thinks it may help. Or at least you might be able to ‘do something like heroes used to do’ as he put it.”  
“And why doesn’t he do it then?”  
She looked rather incensed at his insinuation. “Mr Stark is dealing with a matter off world, if you must know. And he seemed to think you perfectly capable of doing something decent with your time. Please don’t prove him wrong.”

Without another word, or chance for him to say another himself, she turned on her heels and strode quickly back out onto the street.  
Darktruth's hand fell upon the envelope and he examined it with his fingertips, then his gaze rose to the dark corner and found two sets of eyes that watched him uneasily. He swallowed down the last of his hot chocolate in a single gulp, slipped the envelope into his pocket, and then made a swift exit from the cafe before things took a turn that was less than favourable for him.  
\-----------------------------------------------------------------

 

_Hunter Street High_   
_Newcastle, Australia_   
_Now_

 

A girl sat by herself upon the wooden edge that laid out one of the small 'gardens' that were scattered about the school, though in truth it was but a single small, decrepit looking tree amidst a sea of wood-chips and dried out dirt. The navy blue shirt and skirt she wore seemed a size too large for her, with some edges frayed from wear. Her ebony hair tied roughly into a ponytail by a pink hair-band, with a fringe that fell down across her forehead of tan skin.

Her name was Theodora, and her eyes still stung from the night before. She'd watched from the crack in her door as her mother had cheered at the television, as Maverick and his Nation First party won in a landslide election, an election they were meant to lose. Theodora felt her stomach sink as she watched Maverick give his victory speech, as they proudly displayed his promised policies beneath him upon the screen. That was when the first tears began to fall.  
It took every shed of her willpower to not break into tears again, but she couldn't. Not at school. Not anywhere in public. Even if people didn't mock her they would ask that horrid, foul little question.  
'Why?'  
The answer she could never give. There was one time she thought she might have given it, but that was before it became dangerous. Or, rather, more dangerous than it was.  
In truth she shouldn't be surprised, not by any of it. Things weren't exactly a paradise before, and then the X-Men went and disappeared.

"Hey, you okay?"  
Her eyes moved to the young boy that approached her, head tilted slightly to the side almost like a curious animal.  
"I'm fine Rahul," she muttered, as she pretended to turn to fuss with her back pack, but instead tried to discreetly ensure her eyes were clear of any moisture.  
As she turned back she found his brown face almost filled with a smile as he was seated beside her. "Good, because Game Dungeon is holding a special game night, and I need a plus one."  
She chuckled as her chin dropped to her chest. "Is that all I am?"  
"Well, you're really more of a comrade-in-arms, if you prefer."  
"I was thinking I liked 'queen'."  
"Bet you would Dor, not so sure everybody else would though."  
"Then they will have to be subjugated," she replied with a smirk. "What time?"  
"Well the thing says six, but if we get there about five I reckon-"  
"Hey, Muhammad!" shouted a voice.

Both Dor and Rahul turned and let out a groan in unison as their eyes fell upon three boys that moved towards them, two tall and one short but all solidly built, their skin tanned and all with hair a different shade of brown. Darryl, Steve, and Nathan.  
"You got your plane ticket yet?" asked the lead of the group, Darryl.  
Rahul lowered his head as he exhaled, ready to engage in a dance he wasn't at all unfamiliar with. "Where am I going?"  
"Home, dipshit," spat the short one, Steve, quite literally.  
Rahul's eyebrows tightened as his mouth twisted to the left quizzically. "Not sure I need a plane to get to Broadmeadow, pretty sure I walked from there this morning."  
"Iraq, raghead."  
Rahul exhaled sharply with a bounce of his eyebrows. "Pretty sure I'm Indian, but of course I imagine you know more than I. A-a-a-nd I was born here, so there is that."

Darryl took a step, a step that seemed like it should be a stretch for most people but was rather casual for Darryl, until he stood right in front of Rahul. "Me dad says they're getting ready to lock all of you up, terrorusts and muties. Deal with the lot of you."  
"What about mutie terrorists?"  
With an instant of Rahul finishing Darryl shoved him hard in the chest, and in a vain attempt to stay seated Rahul slammed into Dor and they both slammed into the dirt and wood-chips beneath the tree. Dor turned her head to see Darryl move to punch only to stop himself, and take a step back as he smiled goofily with a upwards nod of his head. "Hey Pheeb."

Dor's head snapped in the other direction to find a tall pale-skinned and freckled girl with ginger hair that gently flowed from her head down across her shoulders as she stared at them in the 'garden'. She looked them over with brown eyes curiously. "Are you two a thing now?"  
Dor turned to Rahul only to find his face panicked, and he scrambled to pull himself away from her. "N-no," she replied as she pushed herself up, and tried desperately to brush the dirt from her uniform. "We're just friends."  
"Oh," Phoebe's voice trailed as she glanced them both over. "Thought you'd finally found someone. I mean..." Her eyes glanced Dor's baggy and dirt covered uniform over. "You look... nice. Suits you."

With that Phoebe walked off across the school to were her friends sat, and Dor prepared herself for some extra remark from Darryl's crew only to find they'd also moved on.  
"Why is she always such a bitch?" Rahul grumbled as he also tried to dust himself off. "Darryl and his goons I get, they're parents are morons and probably act just as shitty. Isn't her family like super rich? Can't they afford manners for their daughter? Or are they happy just being rich-arsehole stereotypes."  
"Alas, we shall probably never know," Dor replied as she pulled a few strands of her fringe out in front of her eyes and watched as they shifted from black to ginger and then back again.

 

To Be Continued


End file.
